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Linux Software

Linux Demos? 13

Posted by Cliff from the drawing-attention-to-da-penguin dept.
Sits asks: "Every year my univerisity's computer society hopes to entice new students to join by running a computer display. Last year we ran Q3 test on a Win98 system, but this year we would like to demo something running on Linux. Does anyone know of a flashy way to demonstrate Linux to regular people? Does Linux have an active demo scene and if so would a display of those be appealing to non-technical users?"
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Linux Demos? More

Linux Demos?

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  • Try the OpenGL demos you will somethimes see posted on www.opengl.org. Since NVidia jumped into the GL scene there are plenty of demos that came out and that enticed a lot of people to create more. Also you will have some old demos given with the MESA distribution (I am talking .tar.gz files, not badly precompiled rpms most distributions give nowadays), some of these are still quite ok...

    Geeez, if only Future Crew was still around today! Is there an Assembly 2000 ? :>

    Above all, stay away from VGAlib demos, you don't want to scare people away, do you?!
  • Now that sgi has released performer for linux, you can show a relatively impressive demo of opening up an .flt model and zooming in on it and rotating it and the such. These would be helpful for showing what can be done 3d-wise on your computers.

    Performer can be found at http://www.sgi.com/software/performer/linux.html

    You also mentioned quake3 in your question, this demo is also workable in linux and if you have the full version you could demo some of the more impressive mods.

    For linux-specific demos though, I would recomend the performer demos.
    Aaron Bryden
  • you could try asking RedHat (or SuSe or whatever). Chances are they have already demo'ed linux, and know of a nice one.

    //rdj
  • have a look at
    linuxscn.planet-d.net [planet-d.net]
    you can find there some nice linux demos and other infos about linux demos.

  • Having worked as a tech person in a marketing department, (i.e., I had to write all the damn demos) I can tell you that flashy does not always sell. It may draw a crowd, but it won't always convince people.

    If the purpose of the demo is to get regular people to say "Hey, Linux is cool" and walk away, then an OpenGL screen-saver-like thing is fine.

    But if you want people to think about USING Linux, then you have to think about what kinds of applications they use. Quake is a good idea -- people play games, and it'll draw people in. But then show off StarOffice or WP, Netscape, and maybe The Gimp or CorelDraw, because that's what people actually use. And then pitch them about the cost, get someone in the crowd to use the apps, so that they see for themselves that it's easy to use.

    Remember, regular people care not about their OS -- for them, the computer is simply a tool, not a political statement.

  • How about demoing a MS app running in WINE - Not exactly flashy, but it will show people what it's capable of? Thinking about it though, it would perhaps be better to demonstrate a game or something - I think most peoples perception of Linux is of geeks using CLI's to work out Pi to 348390483 places :)

    .iMMersE
  • Depends on what your club wants to show. We have tried to do the canned demos with openGl and all that, it worked for a few ppl. But it did not blow everyone away. There is always UT for linux which works pretty darn well if you stick with the right hardware, ie. Voodoo's or Nvidia, and get the Creative Live.. You could also go with some cutting edge stuff like helix code and show the avg. joe that the learning curve is very very easy with linux now. I mean most of the target audience (if non-cs) will mostly wanna do:
    1. Research on the web (NetScape and Mozilla)
    2. Email either using hotmail or POP3 etc. (take your pick, i kinda like what i saw with the Helix code ppl.. though there is always mail in emacs:)
    3. Then of course there is the IM's requirements most ppl seem to have. So there is Licq, and GnomeICU, and any AOL client. You could also just show the ICQ java client to ease the transfer from windows boxes.
    4. Word Processing... here is where it can be a great sell, or get ugly. StarOffice. Some ppl like it a lot, others cant stop complaining about speed. Corel has its suite which i think works just fine for almost anything that most ppl do.
    5. Games, here is where windows can get by you, but for demo sake you can show Quake, UT, and a ton of other games.. BSD style ones on console ? ?
    6. REAL MULTI-USER OS : there are a ton of things you can show here. in windows (98 or 2000) only one person can really use the computer at one time. (I know about 'runas' it just dont cut it). I mean being able to work remotely is something that would be of great value for a lot of ppl, you just have to demo this well.
    7. NO MORE FREAKING REBOOTS everytime you install any program. something i did once to just show thing was to install a bunch of software together on many windows on many desktops (Virtual desktops, hahaha, missing in windoz...) and well not just normal stuff, i mean throw on UT, Quake3, StarOffice, and a bunch of stuff on together... switch the desktops.. and then use them without rebooting. Then again you better have a good computer to demo with!
    well just my thoughts, i mean there is always xscreensaver in case you are lazy :)

  • All of the above. (Score:3)

    by bluGill ( 862 ) on Thursday August 31, 2000 @07:24AM (#814541)

    No new demos to add, but some ideas if you have time (and $$$) to make it work.

    Get a graphics card with multipul monitor support (or several cards). On one have a full screen linux demo running. On anouther have Wine (see someone else's post) running something, with some obvious unix things on screen. Maybe visit and get a mac program running too (There is an open source version, but i've never played with it). Mame is anouther neat thing to run (have some game with a good looping demo). The gameboy (vgb), nintendo (ines, snes9x), sega (mastergear), 2600 (stella), atari-800, apple// (prodosemu?), and so on. [ardi.com]

    In other words by not limited yourself to linux you open up a large scene. Just make sure some linux native stuff is running, and you have enough CPU power to do everything.

  • Sorry I barfed the link tag. I should be here [libsdl.org].


    --

  • What you were thinking of is Basilisk II. [uni-mainz.de] Of course, as with any Mac emulator, you need a (preferebly legal) ROM image to run it. Basilisk will take any 512k or greater ROM, and I think it has to be 32-bit clean (so SE/30 or earlier is out).

    Oh, I think you dropped this, </a>

  • To my great surprise, there /was/ an Assembly 2k [assembly.org]. I didn't go, but I doubt there were a lot of great new demos going on...
  • If you're going to demo GIMP, use the most powerfullestest processor with the mostest RAM and kill all unnecessary daemons. Copy some of the demo files that come with other graphics apps, like photoshop etc, and convert them to GIMP so you have some nice pics to start with. Then just let people play with the image and do funny transformations etc. That would hook me :-)

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